ISSN: 1968-2065

Elliott, D. (2020). Music education as/for artistic citizenship. Visions of Research in Music Education, 35.

Retrieved from http://www.rider.edu/~vrme (Reprinted from “Music education as/for artistic citizenship,” 2012, Music Educators Journal, 99(1), 21-27, https://doi.org/10.1177/0027432112452999)

Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenship

By

David Elliott New York University

“Another Perspective: Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenship” by David J. Elliott from Music Educators Journal, Vol. 99 No. 1, © by National Association

for Music Education. Reprinted with Permission.

Another Perspective

Copyright © 2012 National Association for Music EducationDOI: 10.1177/0027432112452999http://mej.sagepub.com

www.nafme.org 21

If music education is going to meet its full potential in the twenty-first cen-tury, then we may need to rethink our

assumptions about the central values of school music. In other words, I am less concerned at the moment with what and how we teach—by means of, say, bands, choirs, iPad orchestras, Orff, jazz ensembles, Suzuki, composing, listening, improvising, world musics, Standards, and so forth—and more concerned with revisiting why we do, or should do, any of these things.

Please do not misunderstand me. I fully support all effective, educative, and ethical ways of teaching and learning music, as well students’ critically reflec-tive and democratic engagement with a reasonable diversity of musical styles and pieces, as I explain in Music Matters and elsewhere.1 What I am suggesting here, however, is that we may have unreal-ized opportunities and responsibilities to integrate traditional means and ends—to integrate musical processes, products, experiences, and outcomes—in the ser-vice of additional or alternative aims.

Let me elaborate my point from another angle. Anything in the world, including worthy endeavors like music education, can be seen and interpreted in many ways. Look at the image shown in Figure 1.2

Perhaps you see this image as a duck, a rabbit, a dog, or something else. Perhaps you see it from a top-down perspective, as if you are flying overhead in a helicop-ter. If so, the image might look like a lake with small rivers at the side and a boat

Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenshipby David J. Elliott

or a swimmer’s head in the water. If you play golf, you might look down and see a large golf green (or a sand trap) with a ball on the surface. Many interpretations are possible.

Whatever your answer(s), the more illusive question this diagram fails to answer is why? Why do you interpret this image in the ways you do? The short answer is that perceptions are simultane-ously cognitive, emotional, social, cul-tural, political, embodied, and so on. In a nutshell, what we see or believe is largely a matter of what we have learned to see or believe as a result of all our informal and formal life experiences.

What does this mean for music educa-tion? For one thing, it means that all the important beliefs and assumptions that

anchor and drive our decisions about what and how to teach and learn in the music classroom and beyond are open to multiple interpretations. Depending on the perspectives that a teacher uses to envision music education, his or her view of aims, values, teaching strategies, cur-riculum, assessment, and so forth may be well-informed, reasonable, broad, deep, or not. Which perspective is best? This is for each one of us to decide, revisit, and re-decide based on our critically reflec-tive considerations of what we know, what we think we know, and most impor-tant, what is most educative and ethical for our students, which brings me back to my main concern.

Regardless of the ways we choose to interpret the what and how of music edu-cation, the logically prior question we must always keep asking ourselves is why are we doing the things we do? There is a wide range of options. Some teachers may answer by saying that we teach music to motivate students’ love of creative music-making and listening, or deepen students’ musical-affective experiences, or win state festivals, or raise students’ math scores and future salary prospects, or prepare stu-dents for lifelong musical learning. I will not debate these options here, but suggest another answer, which teachers may or may not wish to consider when they envi-sion the aims and values of music and edu-cation. The term I use to label my answer and to indicate where I am heading is music education as/for artistic citizen-ship. Please note that when I use artistic, I mean all forms of music-making and

David J. Elliott is a professor and the director of music education at New York University. He can be contacted at david.elliott@nyu.edu.

FIGURE 1Anything can be seen and interpreted in many ways.

Music Educators Journal September 201222

listening and all types of formal and infor-mal musical interactions at all levels in schools and communities. More specifi-cally, music education as/for artistic citi-zenship includes three related themes:

1. Music-making for intrinsic musical experiences is a key aim of music education, but it is not enough. We should also prepare students to “put their music to work” for the bet-terment of other people’s lives and social well-being.

2. Music educators should help students conceive and practice “music-making as ethical action” for social justice.

3. We should aim to infuse school music with an “ethic of care”—care for one-self and for the health of our social communities.

Where do these themes originate? For me and many other writers, the themes of artistic citizenship derive primarily from the concept of “praxis,” which originated with the Greeks in general and Aristotle in particular. Many other philosophers (e.g., Martin Heidegger, William James, John Dewey, Joseph Dunne, Richard Bernstein, and Paulo Freire) have refined and expanded the concept. Thus, com-mon translations of praxis as “to do” or “to make” are partly correct, but simplis-tic. Fully understood, praxis combines several integrated themes: (1) active reflection and critically reflective action dedicated to (2) human well-being and flourishing, (3) the ethical care of others, and (4) the positive empowerment and transformation of people and their every-day lives.

Thus, praxial music education conceives the musical actions we carry out and teach—performing, improvising, composing, arranging, listening, lead-ing, conducting, recording, moving, and dancing (when applicable)—in two inte-grated ways: (1) as actions embedded in and creatively responsive to both the traditional and the ever-changing musi-cal-cultural values of musical pieces and processes and (2) as actions that should be conceived, taught, guided, and applied ethically for the positive transformation of students’ individual and community lives.

When music education is ethically guided—when we teach not only in music (i.e., to do music) and about music but also (and crucially) through music—we empower people to pursue what many philosophers throughout history consider to be the highest human val-ues: a virtuous life well lived, a life of well-being, flourishing, fulfillment, and constructive happiness for the benefit of oneself and others. In other words, praxial music education includes but goes beyond the preparation of students for lifelong engagement in amateur music-making and listening of all kinds. Praxial music education is guided by an informed and ethical disposition to act musically and educatively with continuous concern for improving human well-being in as many ways as possible—artistic, social, cultural, ethical, political, and so forth.

Although these themes may seem impractical to some, the fact is that more and more school and community music educators are, in fact, succeeding in their efforts to teach music in relation to the themes that underpin the nature and val-ues of praxis, praxial music education, and music education as/for artistic citizenship.

The Big PictureConsider the vast spectrum of local, national, and world problems: violence, poverty, starvation, disease, environmen-tal disasters, gender and racial discrimi-nation, and so forth. How do school and community music programs help stu-dents, families, and communities address and deal with these fundamental human problems? Can creative music-making and teaching make a contribution?

In general, we focus our energy on empowering students to make and listen to music for their personal satisfaction. We teach musical skills and understandings using many different methods, musics, and technologies, which we continuously refine and update. Music teacher educa-tion programs prepare students to teach bands, choirs, orchestras, pop and rock music, new computer music technologies, and so on. When these efforts are carried out in educative and ethical ways, they are entirely worthy of support.

However, and notwithstanding the profound values of learning, experiencing, and producing musical beauty of all kinds, let me be provocative for a moment and ask the question that Miles Davis made famous on his album Kind of Blue: “So what?” Viewed in the context of today’s profound social problems, how is music education making a significant difference? Many forms of music education seem rather insular and narrow. Music and music education are often set on a pedestal, out of touch with real-world problems. Is this a good thing? I think not. And I am not alone. For example, in addition to arguing against a simplistic split between means and ends, John Dewey was opposed to the separation of art and life.3 A central tenet of Dewey’s philosophy was to “recover the continuity” between the arts and the processes, products, and needs of people’s everyday lives.4 Are there ways we can add social and ethical weight to some of the things we do? Yes, but doing so involves several steps, which include unpacking the words artistic and citizenship.

Artistic Citizenship?At first glance, artistic citizenship may seem like a contradiction in terms.5 Why? First, artistic often conjures up roman-tic and sanitized images of musicians as unique, isolated, and mysterious individ-uals. From this perspective, all musicians, including music students, may seem more or less “odd” to laypeople. We are often perceived as having magical gifts that allow us to perform, improvise, compose, and otherwise make sounds that move people in deep and exceptional ways. This is true to a point, but most popular portrayals of musicians are naive.

Second, people often use artistic narrowly to mean extraordinary levels of musical expertise, or classical master-pieces, or complex musical structures. From this viewpoint, any values outside “the music itself” are merely social or extramusical and, therefore, not to be taken seriously. However, the counter-argument made by most of today’s lead-ing musical scholars is that since all music, including classical music, is made by peo-ple, with people, and for people who

www.nafme.org 23

live in specific historical-cultural times and places, musical sounds are always inherently multidimensional social, cul-tural, political, gendered, and economic constructions.6

This does not mean that we cannot or should not listen to pieces or perfor-mances for the beauty of their musical structures and expressive details. It means that in addition to learning to make, inter-pret, and listen to formal and expressive features, the concept of “artistic” can and should apply more broadly to the music that all people (students, amateurs, and professionals) listen to, perform, impro-vise, compose, arrange, conduct, and record for a wide range of human pur-poses across cultures, as the majority of today’s “new musicologists,” theorists, and music philosophers maintain.

The paradoxical nature of artistic citizenship comes into sharper focus when we examine the basic meanings of citizenship, which contrast sharply with conventional meanings of artistic. As Richard Schechner explains, citizen-ship emphasizes that a person is not an isolated individual.7 A citizen is part of a larger community. The idea of “being a citizen” originally developed around the need to unite people with varying beliefs to protect shared values and motivate beneficial community actions. So when someone says, “I am an American citi-zen,” it means that he or she has a degree of commitment to a constituted group of people, or what we call “a nation.” Of course, this does not mean that all citi-zens share exactly the same beliefs. Citi-zens must agree on only two things: “that the polity is worth preserving, and that preserving it requires participating in its governance.”8 In return, citizens receive the advantages and responsibilities of being part of something much larger than themselves—a homeland—that many are willing to die for. This is the first and most straightforward meaning of citizenship, but there is much more to consider.

Citizenship ExpandedIn reality, citizenship is a multidimen-sional concept. It includes personal, social, cultural, historical, embodied, eth-

ical, and emotional dynamics and com-mitments that ebb and flow as a person’s and a nation’s circumstances change.9 Also, citizenship is infused with images, symbols, metaphors, longings, memories, myths, heroes and heroines, anthems, marches, slogans, and stock characters, for example, the warrior, the hardwork-ing immigrant, the dangerous alien, and the nomad. Thus, citizenship is an ambig-uous and fluid phenomenon, especially when citizens interact to create multi-ple citizenships or “subcitizenships”—local, regional, institutional, national, international, and professional.

What citizenships do you hold and practice? In addition to your American or Canadian citizenship (or whatever), you are also a citizen of your local commu-nity, school, and faculty, as well as the domain called music education. In each case, you have privileges and responsi-bilities that you may or may not choose to accept.

Bad Citizenship

An expanded concept of citizenship is not only more realistic; it also opens a range of possibilities, including the possibility

that a citizen could deliberately choose to engage in acts of “bad citizenship” to improve the conditions of his or her social group, including injustices of race and gender discrimination, poverty, abuse, bullying, violence, and so on.

Fredrick Douglas, Henry David Thoreau, and Albert Einstein supported actions of bad citizenship to various degrees, if and when needed. Thoreau originated the concept and practice of civil disobedience, which he viewed as acting as an “oppositional” citizen for the betterment of the larger citizenry.10 That is, and ideally, civil disobedience draws attention to and moves the majority to perceive how bad specific conditions really are. By suffering the inevitable consequences, “good-bad” citizens can often spotlight, pressure, subvert, attack, and overturn unjust laws, policies, and politicians, among other things. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi led millions in courageous, masterful, and successful “performances” of resistance, or bad citizenship (in the context of pre-vailing norms), that changed their nations and the world. By courage and example, Rosa Parks sparked a key event in the U.S. civil rights movement. Consider what

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is happening now in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other nations—thousands of good-bad citizens are fighting and dying for the betterment of their families, communities, and homelands.

These thoughts lead to yet another concept of citizenship, which I will intro-duce with several questions: Is there a

specific kind of citizenship that applies to musicians and music educators? Or do our mysterious talents and the artistic val-ues of music exempt us from the respon-sibilities embedded in citizenship and the social-political-ethical potentials of music and music education? If not, what respon-sibilities do we have and what practices

should we follow? Can we be perfectly law-abiding with regard to our nations, communities, and profession and also be bad citizens of, for, and through music and music education? Yes. To start with a very simple example, some people (e.g., some benefactors of symphony orchestras) might argue that composers, conductors, and performers of radical new musics are bad musical citizens because they inten-tionally challenge the status quo of the “great music” establishment. Composers and performers of protest music are often seen in the same light. And in what ways is it possible or appropriate to be a bad citizen of “the state” called music educa-tion? I leave it to you to reflect critically and/or act on possibilities.

Moving toward AnswersThe mysteries of musical ability and the intrinsic values of music do not prevent or excuse us from teaching all forms of music-making for the betterment of our social communities. We can have the best of both. In fact, many music makers—students, teachers, amateurs, and profes-sionals—already make music in Henry Thoreau–type ways, meaning that they apply their musical abilities, and the emo-tional powers of music, to resist or sub-vert the harmful conventions and politics of their locations, or create various forms and degrees of musical-civil disobedi-ence and “musical-ethical spectacles.” There are many examples. Think of Pete Seeger’s protest songs and performances, which were intended to alert, inform, and move listeners—to move listeners emo-tionally and to move them to act against the oppressions of American social and political policies of the time. The West-East Divan Orchestra, founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, is a youth orchestra that unites young musicians in politically and religiously opposed coun-tries of the Middle East. To Barenboim, “music has an intimate life with politics. It is unthinkable that a political project would be influential and resonant with-out the legitimacy and power of music and the arts.”11

Before offering more examples, let me reemphasize some key points. I am not

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saying we should replace any viable and ethical way of teaching music that is aimed at lifelong musical participation and per-sonal fulfillment. I am suggesting that we should aim to make additional contribu-tions to and changes in society. This means expanding our vision of musical means and ends and heightening our students’ understandings of why, what, and how to implement the powers of music and music education as/for artistic citizenship.

Again, I am not alone in making these suggestions. John Dewey, Richard Shus-terman, Wayne Bowman, Thomas Regel-ski, Tia DeNora, and many other scholars and musicians argue that music and the other arts should not be placed on an aesthetic pedestal, above the every day world, isolated for contemplation and consumption in concert halls and muse-ums. This statement is not a rejection of classical music, or masterworks, or concert hall performances, or musical organizations that embrace all or some of these mainstays. Rather, my statement is intended to mean that the powers and values of music and the other arts include and exceed conventional notions of art. To Dewey, the values of music (poetry, painting, dance, and so on) do not reside solely in what Westerners typically con-ceive as “art objects.” Rather, the values of music and other artistic pursuits are to be found in the dynamic social-experiential activities through and in which music is made, experienced, and put to work for a variety of overlapping and interweav-ing human purposes and benefits—practical, democratic, social, cultural, ethical, and so forth. Viewed from this perspective, music and music education gain even more value and significance. By integrating music and music education with all aspects of social life and commu-nity, we do not forfeit music’s greatness and profundity; we fortify and increase it.

If this seems utopian, be aware that music educators around the world are already practicing artistic citizenship. And consider the words of the eminent educa-tor and social activist Jean Anyon: “The utopian thinking of yesteryear becomes the common sense of today.”12 Utopian dreams of freedom were in the minds, hearts, actions, and music of enslaved

black people in the early 1800s. Because of their visionary thinking, slavery was offi-cially abolished sixty years later, an event that continues to fuel many movements for social change in the United States and around the world. Far from being useless, visionary thinking is a necessary prelude to the transformation of people’s lives.

“Particip-action”

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McAdam says, “people’s personal iden-tities transform as they become socially active, and actions for social justice create new categories of participants and political action groups: identities modify in the course of social interac-tion.”13 People—including music stu-dents and music educators—develop a social-political identity and commitment from walking, marching, singing, or otherwise working musically with oth-ers toward effective and ethical social change. Note, too, that young people are often at the heart of many success-ful social movements. For example, in the ranks of protestors in the civil rights movement were many young men and women, including college students. Thousands of protesters in the Middle East today are young people who com-bine many forms of culture and media—music, visual art, dance, and social media—in fighting oppression.

As music educators, we are fortunate to work with energetic young people, and all of us work with music’s powers of emotional arousal and expression, which, in turn, can fire the engines of social arousal and expression. But what do we do with these potential powers? Often, we focus our efforts on preparing stu-dents to perform “Lincolnshire Posey,” or identify musical elements, or work demo-cratically in classroom garage bands, or sight-read accurately, or improvise jazz creatively. Taught and learned artistically, contextually, and ethically, these are wor-thy endeavors, of course, but they are not enough. On another level, some teacher education programs engage students in dialogues about Freire, Marx, Foucault, Derrida, and so on. Dialogues are impor-tant, as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. As Miles Davis asks, “So what?” Where are the other values of music, and where are the musical-social actions and musical-ethical particip-actions? Where is the development of students’ sense of musical/social/civil/ethical responsibil-ity? What do the excellent artistic-musical achievements of school music programs do for students, their families, and oth-ers who face debilitating local, national, and international social problems and injustices?

There is absolutely no doubt that individual and group music-making and listening comfort, sustain, and inspire people and transform individual lives. But in larger terms, I am moved to sug-gest that many school and community music programs are capable of much more. Again, we cannot forfeit what we do so well. I fell in love with music and music education through my school and community music-making programs and experiences, and through my interactions with thoughtful, democratic, and inspir-ing teachers. I’ve spent my academic career trying to improve and protect such programs, and I will continue to do so. But what I see in the world prompts me to question music programs that fail to include ways of empowering students to practice lifelong music-making for both musical and social transformation.

Artistic CitizenshipExamples of music education as/for artis-tic citizenship stretch from Africa to the Arctic, from Estonia to Ireland to the United States and beyond. Allow me to begin with the work of two of my former students, Mary Piercey and Casey Hayes.

After graduating from the University of Toronto in the 1990s, Mary Piercey chose to teach in Arviat, a small Inuit community on the shore of Hudson Bay in the Canadian region of Nunavut. After decades of neglect and oppression by the Canadian government, Arviat was a largely underserved and culturally mar-ginalized community. To make a very long story short, and because of Piercey’s continuous efforts to activate music and music education in the service of social justice, negotiation, and group transfor-mation, both the people and the tradi-tional culture of Arviat have blossomed in numerous ways, as I detail elsewhere.14

Casey Hayes, an esteemed band and choral teacher for twenty years, was fired from his school music position in 2002 when his colleagues discovered he was gay. After coming to New York Univer-sity (NYU) for his doctoral work, Hayes performed and conducted with the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus and founded the Ambassador Chorus. His gay, lesbian,

bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) choral work focused on commissioning and per-forming original works aimed at empow-ering high school students and members of the adult community to understand and practice artistic citizenship musically for the welfare and liberation of GLBT citizens locally and nationally. These works included, for example, “A Great Generation,” by Eric Lane Barnes, which is a dramatic musical expression of GLBT issues related to the military, AIDS, and loneliness.

The GLBT musical repertoire has benefited enormously from contribu-tions by many composers and performers since the 1970s. As artistic citizens, pop, rock, and hip-hop composers/perform-ers (e.g., James Taylor, U2, Elton John, Madonna, Tori Amos) took a major role in supporting AIDS victims when AIDS was a “socially unacceptable disease.” Con-temporary classical composers have pro-duced many compositions motivated by GLBT themes (e.g., John Corigliano’s Sym-phony No. 1, Meredith Monk’s New York Requiem, Pauline Oliveros’s Epigraphs in the Time of AIDS, and Lawrence Axelrod’s Common Threads), and band composers (e.g., Mark Camphouse and Frank Ticheli) have created several works on themes of social justice. To some members of the public, these musicians might qualify as bad musical citizens because they chose to “compromise” the so-called purity of their art by infusing their compositions with “socially disturbing” material. This is an all-too-common but logically, ethi-cally, and artistically indefensible attitude.

Sheila Woodward’s DIME project—Diversion Into Music Education—began in Cape Town, South Africa. Later, she linked her Florida music education pro-gram to her Cape Town university pro-gram. DIME focuses on gaining judicial approval to liberate juvenile offenders from prison on the condition that they engage actively in and benefit personally and socially from participating in DIME’s marimba programs. Research docu-mentation suggests that DIME has been extremely effective in transforming the social, emotional, ethical, and economic lives of the participants, their families, and their communities.15

www.nafme.org 27

In addition to teaching community music courses at NYU that emphasize and exemplify ways of infusing music education with artistic citizenship and social justice, I teach a graduate course called “Teaching Composition in Jun-ior High and Secondary Schools.” Some background may help in understanding the means and ends of this course, which includes the why, what, and how of com-position teaching and composing as/for artistic citizenship. I began teaching com-position in 1973 in my secondary school’s general music courses. Since then, I have continuously refined the scope and sequence of the curriculum models I’ve developed to make composing accessible, achievable, and meaningful for a wide range of students with varying interests and abilities.

My NYU students learn to teach com-position by composing themselves and by teaching each other in relation to the curriculum models I’ve generated and the models they generate themselves. Basically, I engage the students in com-posing across a progressive range of musical styles beginning with twenty-first- century soundscape and aleatoric forms, followed by electroacoustic music, rap and hip-hop, serial music, songwriting, and more. In each musical style context, students’ compositions include pieces they create to express their own musi-cal, emotional, and personal meanings, as well as a variety of social/political/cultural themes related to (for example) peace and reconciliation, race and gender discrimination, bullying, violence, dis-ease, abuse, and poverty.

Another real-world example of stu-dents involved in artistic citizenship relates to a horrendous Irish Republican Army car bomb that killed and injured more than two hundred people in the town of Omagh, North Ireland, in 1998. In the aftermath, Daryl Simpson, a local music teacher, formed the Omagh Youth Choir. Simpson sought to unite Catholic and Protestant young people by engag-ing them in performing and composing pieces that centered on issues of peace, mutual understanding, and reconcilia-tion. As a result, the choir’s many acts of artistic citizenship were so powerful and

widely distributed in Ireland and beyond that they were able to spread their mes-sages of peace and unification effectively, produce moving recordings, and seed similar programs.16

An extraordinary example of artis-tic citizenship is detailed in the film The Singing Revolution.17 This documen-tary chronicles how tens of thousands of Estonians participated in ending the Soviet occupation of their nation in 1991 through the power of mass-singing events that began in 1989. Of course, the powerful musical-social activism of the Estonian population was anchored in deep traditions of Estonian music-mak-ing and music teaching, as well as the long-standing devotion of hundreds of dedicated and highly skilled school and community music teachers.

Music’s PotentialI could mention many other instances of artistic citizenship in schools and com-munities. Some are modest in scope, oth-ers are large scale. Nonetheless, they all count as important examples of efforts to rethink and revision dimensions of music education for the betterment of oth-ers’ lives. I believe it is possible to enact music education as/for artistic citizen-ship. I believe it is worth the effort. Music has much to offer the world. We should unleash its full potential.

Notes

1. David J. Elliott, Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Chapters 2, 7, 9, 10, and 11 emphasize the importance of teaching and learning all forms of music-making. Chapters 4, 6, 8, 10, and 11 explain the natures and values of music listening and musi-cal works. See also David J. Elliott, “‘Socializing’ Music Education,” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 6, no. 4 (2007): 60–95 (http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Elliott6_4.pdf); and David J. Elliott and Marissa Silverman, “Why Music Matters: Philosophical and Cultural Foundations,” in Music, Health, and Wellbeing, ed. R. MacDonald, G. Kreutz, and L. Mitchell (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 25–39.

2. John Jastrow, “The Mind’s Eye,” Popular Science Monthly 54 (1899): 312. This image is in the public domain in the United States. Many different versions have been pub-lished since 1899.

3. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1934), 16.

4. Ibid.

5. Randy Martin, “Artistic Citizenship: Introduction,” in Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts, ed. Mary Schmidt Campbell and Randy Martin (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1.

6. See the writings of Susan McClary, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Tia DeNora, Noëll Carroll, Jenefer Robinson, Richard Shusterman, Patrik Juslin, Ian Cross, Wayne Bowman, and Thomas Regelski.

7. Richard Schechner, “A Polity of Its Own Called Art,” in Artistic Citizenship, 33–41.

8. Ibid.

9. Martin, “Artistic Citizenship,” 10.

10. As explained in Schechner, “A Polity,” 34.

11. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, eds., Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 229.

12. Jean Anyon, Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and New Social Movement (New York: Routledge, 2005), 6.

13. Doug McAdam, Dynamics of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 126.

14. Elliott, “Socializing.”

15. For verification of this research, contact Sheila Woodward at scwoodwa@honors .usf.edu.

16. For a commentary on and a perfor-mance by the Omagh Community Youth Choir, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ohx398P7I.

17. The Singing Revolution, directed by James Tusty and Maureen Tusty (Tallinn, Estonia: New Video Group, 2009), DVD.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in “Another Perspective” are those of the author and may not concur with those of the National Association for Music Education. The goal of this column is to remind us that great minds sometimes think differently!

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